2021-01-16

Staying on top of things

Over the past year of the pandemic, stuck working from home, I have become lax with regard to various activities which are all forms of staying on top of things. Tidying my room before I go to bed; digitising incoming paper without regard for its urgency; maintaining free space by throwing things out I can't see myself using. With the change in my motivational capacities brought on by not seeing many people in person regularly, with most of these things I've switched to only getting them sorted out at the point at which it becomes necessary to do so, rather than on a sort of regular schedule -- e.g. doing laundry because I don't have much left to wear, not just because it's Saturday.

I've learned from this that I was probably over valuing doing many of these things in such a regularised way. It doesn't bother me so much anymore to have them left undone, and it's not actually getting in my way too much. I think that there is probably a lesson here that I could apply to anxiety-inducing situations in general. It is all to easy to overvalue in the moment what one does not actually consider that important. This sort of experience is one of the few silver linings of the general mental health impacts of the pandemic -- hopefully I can refer back to it in the future.

More specifically, I think that being highly regular with so many things was a form of workaholism. I'd suspected I was a workaholic for a while, but didn't really have a way to address it because I couldn't imagine being any other way. This sort of experience with letting certain things slip might help me to build a conception of living as a non-workaholic once things are back to normal.